My flight into Mariscal Sucre Airport, just outside of Quito, Ecuador, was the scariest of my year-long journey around the world. As the flight from Buenos Aires approached Quito, nestled at 8,200 feet in the Andes, I had a birdseye view of the city. The buildings of Quito snake up the sides of the huge mountains and around the lips of canyons that wind between them.

The airport runway sits atop a long narrow ridge top, edged on either side by steep canyons. As we approached the landing strip, the winds were blowing fiercely, buffeting our plane from side to side. Just 5 - 10 feet above the runway, the plane was wobbling so much that the pilot suddenly nosed it up, goosed it, and, and as we all hung on to our seats, he urged the plane slowly upward in preparation for another landing attempt. During the 10 - 15 minutes we circled the airport, as the heavy winds continued, I popped a Lorazepam, which I kept on hand just for such occasions.

When I first arrived in New Zealand, I had just broken off a romance with a man whom I had hoped to travel with here. I had discovered--by sleuthing on his Facebook page--an irrefutable trail of deceit that left me no alternative but to end the relationship.

So, here I was on my own in New Zealand, reeling from a disheartening betrayal. But, as I’ve said in previous blogs, life goes on while you’re traveling. . . and this was just a bump in the road.

Just 10 days before, I was lazing on the beach in Phuket, Thailand, reflecting on my travels over the past three months in Africa and Asia. The next day I boarded a plane in Bangkok, headed for Perth, Australia.

Ah, Australia! I’d be able to drink tap water without worrying about getting sick. I was also looking forward to renting a car. In Africa and Asia, driving a rental car would have been suicidal for a Westerner.

When I got off the plane at Perth Airport just outside of Western Australia's capital city Perth, I wondered where all the people were. It was after midnight. I could see a sky full of stars above the terminal, but there were just a few folks milling around. I drew a deep breath in appreciation of this moment's solitude.

Scary border crossing. When we arrived at the Hanoi airport in north Vietnam on November 8, I feared my visa would not be accepted, since just hours before we landed I noticed that it had fallen apart along its fold-line. My passport had been opened and closed so many times since I left the states seven months ago that my Vietnam visa inside simply deteriorated. My fears proved to be well-founded; I was rudely questioned and detained for four stressful hours by immigration in Hanoi before I was finally issued a new visa and admitted into the country.

Not an auspicious beginning! But, at least, due to a little help from my friends (thank god for travel buddies), I was finally in Vietnam!

Just three hours after my flight left the New Delhi airport at 10 a.m. October 26 bound for Bangkok, the magnitude 7.5 Hindu Kush earthquake struck South Asia. Though the earthquake’s epicenter was in Afghanistan, there were hundreds of casualties in Pakistan and the tremors in New Delhi sent thousands of panicked people into the streets. I didn't learn of the earthquake until just after I arrived in Bangkok.

I had a few days to kill in Bangkok before meeting up with my next tour group, Intrepid Travel’s “30-day Indochina Loop,” which included Thailand, and later Laos, Vietnam and Cambodia.

I quickly learned that the Thais really know how to put on a show. Glitz is everywhere. . . in the ornate temples, the golden Buddhas, the orchestrated elephant performances, and the brash "Ladyboy" shows.

When I first arrived in India after ten grueling days in Madagascar, I made a beeline for Goa, an old Portuguese port on India’s southwest coast known for its beach resorts. I was in serious need of R & R.

When I arrived in Goa I was completely exhausted so I was deliriously happy to see a sari-clad Indian woman waiting at the gate holding a placard with my name on it. . . my ride to the hotel!

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The afternoon of Nov. 1, I took one final look around my house, scanning the empty space for anything the movers might have missed. I was also saying a last goodbye to this little sanctuary that I’d created for myself in the middle of suburban Santa Cruz. I could walk to town, take a shuttle to the UC Santa Cruz campus, and yet, the neighborhood was quiet and I could occasionally hear coyotes and great horned owls at night.

I had planned to live the rest of my life in this beautiful place. But after 30 years in the Aptos hills, Bonny Doon and within the Santa Cruz city limits, I was finally pulling up my roots and moving out of state, to Corvallis, Oregon.

t’s not difficult to convey the environmental impacts of clear-cut logging; just look at the big, ugly bald patches of scarred earth after a clear-cut and you get it. But too often, an alternative to clear-cutting — known as selection logging — is offered as a panacea. Wow, it looks so much better than a clear-cut, especially when you’re looking at photos taken by timber companies doing the logging.

But if you get down into the weeds, so to speak, as forest scientists do, you start finding that selection logging also has problems…they’re just not as visible. One of the biggest problems of selection logging is the ground disturbance from the haul roads and skid trails cut into the forest to take the trees out.

Sometimes reading a science article can be downright scary. On September 5, I read a piece in the Guardian, “Plastic fibers found in tap water around the world, study reveals.” U.S. scientific researchers analyzed tap water samples from more than a dozen nations for an investigation by Orb Media (orbmedia.org), a non-profit journalism group. The Orb study, entitled “Invisibles: The plastics inside us,” concluded that billions of people on five continents are drinking water contaminated by plastic micro-particles.